Saturday, January 31, 2015

Canadians must say "NO" to Islamic centre in Montreal's east end....

“The teachings of what this person espouses, we reject totally as a society based on the rule of law, based on democratic values, the equality of men and women and the rejection of homophobia in all its forms.” (From the Montreal Gazette, the words of Quebec Immigration, Inclusion and Diversity Minister, Kathleen Weil, concerning the potential establishment of an Islamic Centre in East Montreal, by radical Imam, Hamza Chaoui.)
Just as the Canadian government introduced legislation empowering intelligence and security agencies to aggressively and pre-emptively intervene to block any action that "may" lead to terrorism, the headlines break, as if to snub their arrogant noses at the authorities, that radical Islam, including the desired imposition of Sharia law (if social media posts are to be given credence), raises its ugly head in Montreal.
Let us raise our voice, along with the millions of other Canadians, to protest even the thought of granting a permit to this or any other radical Islamic "cleric" in this or in any other region of our country.
The rubber has finally met the road, both in terms of the facts and in terms of the Canadian public consciousness, that radical Islam is a force that has moved into our neighbourhoods, our cities and thereby into the minds of susceptible and vulnerable young innocent and easily duped Canadian youth. And the time has come for all Canadians, of all political and religious stripes, including the agnostics and atheists among us, to stand up to this virulent and toxic cancer. Of course, we will take the legal, constitutional and politically correct route, without resorting to arms and violence, the stock and trade of the radical Islamic terrorist movement, to stop this and all other attempts to establish such an Islamic centre.
More importantly, however, Canadians need to hear loudly and often, from our Muslim moderates that they too oppose this centre's establishment, and the granting of any kind of permit by municipal authorities for such a centre to occupy any of our facilities in any of our towns and cities.
This story will be a test of the public courage and the public defiance of the moderate Muslim community that they are joined with the rest of the society in driving this force from our country.
However, we all know that driving this specific imam and his initiative from the east end of Montreal will not eradicate the scourge of radical Islam from our midst. It could, in fact, even enhance the determination of those radical Muslims to continue their fight using even more vehement and violent measures. Already two Canadian service personnel have been murdered by demented and now deceased men whose lives were allegedly veering in the direction of radical Islam. Their deaths, as well as the kind of forced entry of this imam, and all other potential radical Islamists, will not spell the eradication of the scourge of radical Islam. And all official acts, with all the enhanced budgets and hirings in the intelligence and security agencies in Canada will not prove completely effective in erasing social, culture, political and "pseudo-religious" disease from our landscape.
We have to mount an aggressive, creative and long-lasting program of counter-education among those most vulnerable to the brain-washing of radical Islam.
Last night, PBS aired the 1975 Paddy Chayefsky movie, Network, in which Harry Beal the fictional anchor of UBS news morphs into a phenomenon ranting against the hypocrisies of the western world
in which Chayefsky envisions the replacement of nation states with corporations in a world dominated by the exchange of money, a move to which Beal is viscerally and physically opposed.
In many ways, Chayefsky's imagination is so chilling that it effectively foresees the world in which we currently live.
And terror, in many forms, has been with us for decades, even abrogated for the purpose of profit by television programmers in pursuit of ratings and political and narcissistic "adulation". What is playing out in Montreal is not a television drama; it is not a made-for television movie, nor is it a piece of fiction. It is a physical empirical application for a permit to establish a radical Islamic centre in what is to Canadians the most international and urbane city inside our borders.
And Canadians, while retaining our sense of decorum and decency, must rise up and join the protest to block this centre's opening and demand of our political leaders a kind of uniquely Canadian response to this ideological terrorism.